PASSARO

The PASSARO project aims to work simultaneously on several areas that have been identified by Airbus D&S in their Call JTI-CS2-2015-CPW02-AIR-02-06 concerned with Airframe on-ground structural and functional tests of advanced structures. Indeed, the increased use of composite materials in today’s civil aircraft requires important changes to working approaches hitherto optimised for use on more traditional metallic aerostructures. Furthermore, there is a continuous demand to reduce aircraft development costs by optimising the use of resources (material, energy and human) in terms of eco-efficient manufacturing process whilst also in parallel increasing design, development and testing flexibility. In product terms this allows a more cost and weight efficient aircraft to be proposed which has lower operating costs. Associated with the implementation of this new design philosophy, the expensive on-ground physical and functional testing which accompany these changes of approach must also be adapted and made as efficient as possible. A key driver for this is the use of affordable emerging Information and automation technologies for verifying the A/C systems’ functionality and security on board, as well as the quality of the product, prior to its first flight. It is in this context that PASSARO’s high level objective is to demonstrate on representative prototypes including full scale physical ground demonstrators (a cockpit structure, external wing and aileron) the applicability of several technologies for use in design, manufacturing and ground testing. Work has been organised into 4 distinct groups: Multi-functional aerostructure design using intelligent technologies, Aerostructures testing and innovative NDI & repair, Application of new information & automation technologies to manufacturing & maintenance, and lastly Full integration of functional testing procedures using innovative ergonomic IT devices.